Are you using the right method of NFP?

If you are all done finding out which character from The Hunger Games you are, which character from Downton Abbey you are, and which character from pornoDownton Abbey you are, you might be ready for a quiz that actually helps:  Which Method of NFP Is Right for Me?

For a lot of couples, NFP is even more of a hassle than it needs to be because they’re not using the best method for them.  We happened to stumble into Creighton just because our local hospital offered classes on it; and it turned out to be a good fit for us (although it wasn’t truly tolerable until I discovered OTC progesterone cream.  I think I will write a separate post about that, because it was such a game-changer).

Anyway, try the test from IuseNFP.com and see if maybe you could find a better fit for your personality, your physical situation, and your needs.  It’s not a flawlessly precise quiz, of course, but it may point you in a better direction if you’re really struggling. Sometimes changing methods makes all the difference!

And poke around the IuseNFP site while you’re at it. Lots and lots of useful information there, all in one spot — plus cheeky graphics like this:

And of course, if you are already using NFP and are struggling, or you don’t understand why NFP-users struggle, or you know a couple who’s insterested, or you would just like a shoulder to cry on, you should buy my book, The Sinner’s Guide to NFP.

 

In which my kids make Valentine’s Day weird and creepy

We’ve been doing 3-D lollipop valentines for the last few years. Here is how it turns out when a normal family does this project:

PIC 3D lollipop valentine

 

Cute, eh? It is easy:

1. Take a picture of your kid extending a fist toward the camera.  Leave some blank space in the background for the lollipop and message.

2. If you like, photoshop a greeting onto the image.  If you are alert, you will remember how to paste things in with a transparent background; and if you care, you will be able to talk your kids out of choosing tacky images.  (This year, I was neither alert nor did I care.)

3. Print out enough photos for the class.  We use Walmart’s photo service – turns out fine.

4. Using an Exacto knife, make a slit above and below (or on both sides of) the fist.  Insert a Dum-Dum or other lollipop through the slits, so it looks like the kid is holding a giant lollipop, and tape the stick in place on the back of the photo.

Here is what we have so far this year (before getting prints and inserting lollipops):
one standard (?) lollipop holder:

 

one kid who wants to have the dog holding the lollipop in his mouth:

one kid who is just a crumb:

and one kid who wants to have the lollipop going in one ear and out the other:

I’m sure the school misses the old days, when we were new and paranoid and sure that everyone would be judging us, so we tried extra hard to seem like decent people.

There’s nothing funny about race, sex, religion, handicaps, or ANYTHING, EVER.

The other day, I got taken to task for giggling a bit over this story: a transgendered woman is running against an openly gay man for public office in Maryland.  My comment was, “Boy, it gets harder and harder to stand out.”  This was, according to my critic, an unacceptably unchristian way of mocking a human person who struggles with a heavy cross.

And I thought I was just having a larf.  The funny thing is, even the people involved thought it was kind of funny, too:

“It’s strange and comical at the same time that I happen to be living in a district with a gay senator,” Beyer said. “The fact that both of us are LBGT probably neutralizes the issue completely. I think it says a lot about how far America has come.”

Well, we can debate that. But I see no reason that, in order to be Christians, we have to take a cheese grater to our sense of humor — just shear it right off until we’re smooth and harmless.  Can we treat people like they’re subhuman, just because they’re different?  Heck no.  But funny stuff is funny stuff.  People are funny, life is weird, and when we’re not free to notice that and have a laugh, it’s harder to find a reason to live.

So, that was last week. What’s the latest from the world of exquisitely sensitive metajournalists?  Stop laughing at Sochi!  Just stop it, you insensitive meanies!

#SochiProblems Is More of An Embarrassment For America Than It Is For Russia

Taking pictures of horrifying, orange drinking water in a country that is trying to pass itself off as civilized?  And giggling over lousy accommodations in hotels that are only halfway built?  Oh, the humanity!  It would be so much more humane, in some way which I will figure out later, if people pretended there is nothing bizarre about stumbling across this lugubrious grove of undistributed coat racks.

According to hey are supposed to avert their eyes and think about suffering . . . always, always think about suffering.

Under pressure to quickly build a glorious Olympic village from a patch of mud, Russian corporations ended up denying their 70,000 workers wages, sanitary accommodations and, in many cases, basic human rights. As Ukrainian worker Maxim told Human Rights Watch about his experience in construction for the Olympics: “People work, they don’t get paid, and leave. Then a bus comes and unloads a fresh group of workers to repeat the cycle.”

If you worked under such conditions, would you take the time to distribute the coat racks?

She goes on to explain that other funny stuff is also not funny, because something something shame on you.

Note to recent journalism graduate:  this stuff is funny.  It’s okay to laugh at funny stuff. Nobody is making the case that Russians are subhuman, or that they deserve to live in such a backassward country, one that is willing shell out billions on ritzy, pretentious Potempkin hotels, but is so mired in corruption, it can’t supply clean water or basic utilities.  Nobody is taking pictures of starving people and going “wacka wacka!”  Nobody is saying, “Ukranian worker Maxim is so stupid, he doesn’t even know how to put coat racks away!”  The joke is on the Russian government, who had years and years to prepare — and on the Olympic commitee, who, for some reason, picked Russia.  Russia.

Man, I am pretty, pretty tired of this “don’t ever laugh at anything ever ever ever” stuff.  Geez, the Russians laugh at themselves. That’s part of what makes them Russian.  Finger-wagging joke stompers with their Masters in journalism, though, are a hell of a lot less appealing.

Seven Quick Reasons the author of SGNFP is one classy dame

–1–

When I first submitted the ebook manuscript to Amazon, I got this message:

The book “The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning” you recently submitted to KDP has possible spelling errors in your converted file. Consider correcting these and resubmitting.

Here are the errors we recommend you address by correcting your manuscript:

judgey
providentialism
caritas
intercoursal
coitalicious

That advice, I did not take.

 

–2–

If you order it new, full price, from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or from the publisher, you can get it for under $10.  But if you are really into taking advantage of those special financing offers, you might want to snap up this deal:

My cart is eligible! I feel so privileged.

 

–3–

At no point in any part of this book do I suggest that a typical example of someone who has a legitimate reason to avoid pregnancy is someone who is in a concentration camp.

–4–

The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning was written by someone who feels comfortable quoting Pope Pius XII’s Address to Italian Midwives, and then backing it up with a picture of thumbs-up Garfield.  New Evangelization FTW!*  Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

PIC thumbs-up Garfield

–5–

If you read it, you will become qualified to weigh in on the debate of the century:  who sounds more uncomfortable?  The priest interviewer trying to delicately ask why a woman who had nine children in sixteen years is qualified to speak about family planning?  Or me, trying to answer that question while ignoring the child wailing, “Mamaaaaaaa, Boomer frew up on the tweadmiwwwwwwwwww!” outside the bedroom door?

 

–6–

Unlike the cover of the Kindle version, the cover of the print version no longer includes sideboob, such as this:

Instead, it includes a lock of hair the exact shape of sideboob, like this:

 

Simcha Fisher in print:  now a classy dame.

 

–7–

Alice von Hildebrand

PIC A v H before reading SGNFP

read it and said it changed her forever

PIC A v H after reading SGNFP

 

Simcha Fisher:  no longer a classy dame.

 

*For the Whatever

****

 

 Much classier dames at  Conversion Diary! Check it out.

At the Register: Speaking of Empty Promises

I don’t trust you to save me from sin if you can’t even bring yourself to say “sin.”

I’ll be on Al Kresta today at 5 Eastern

I know, I already said it, but I wasn’t sure of the time. Now I am!  I really enjoyed this interview. Al Kresta is a funny guy, and very smart.  You can listen live here.

Bathwater Saints

Guess what I lerned on Facebook the other day?  Nah, you’ll never guess, so I’ll just tell you: Abby Johnson is a fake pro-lifer.  She just sits on her ass (that’s a direct quote) and bathes in publicity, without actually accomplishing anything.  She’s not really pro-life — not pro-life enough.

This statement is so patently nutty that it’s hard to even know how to respond.  Abby Johnson, who is pregnant, appears to spend almost no time sitting down — busy as she is with And Then There Were None and now partnering with the Guiding Star Project to open a Resource Center and Maternity Home in Texas, where she lives.  Johnson is ministering directly, with spiritual, emotional, and tangible physical aid and support, both to abortion industry workers, and to women who need help beyond the choice to keep their babies.

Let’s review:  Abby Johnson gives people a reason to stop performing abortions.  She gives people a reason not to get abortions.  She drags her pregnant self around the country, daily exposing herself to abuse from the left and from the right, and hasliterally made an open book of her life and her past with Planned Parenthood.  If anyone is saving babies and women (and men) from abortion, it’s Abby Johnson.

But . . . she’s not pro-life enough.

The only explanation I can find for such an idea is what I call “bathwater thinking.”  You’ve heard of throwing out the baby with the bathwater?  This is mistaking the bathwater for the baby.  Sometimes people are so devoted to a particular way of achieving something good,they make the way their main focus — their “baby” — while the original goal becomes the amorphous, disposable background.  It’s bathwater thinking that leads people to believe that someone like Abby Johnson isn’t pro-life, because she doesn’t check off all the boxes in the How To Be Pro-Life checklist, which was drafted forty years ago.

Bathwater thinking.  You forget the baby, the living, breathing people involved, and wallow around in that warm, familiar bathwater of your indisputably worthy cause.

Let’s think about St. Gianna Molla.  A good many people believe that this woman’s greatness came in her eager, joyful acceptance of death in order to save her baby.  Not so.  It is true that she was willing to accept the risk of death when she refused the therapeutic hysterectomy that would have killed her unborn child.  And she did end up giving her life so that her baby could live.  But the whole time, she prayed and hoped and longed to live. She wasn’t devoted to being pro-life: she was devoted to herbaby.  And she wanted to live, so that she could be with her baby and her husband and the rest of her beloved children.  She was pro-life:  she hoped for life in abundance, including her own.

The same is true, in a somewhat different way, for St. Maria Goretti.  Over and over, I’ve heard this saint praised as a holy girl who prized her viginity so highly that she was willing to die to defend it.  And she did die as a result of defending her viginity.  But when her would-be rapist attacked her, she pleaded with him to stop because he would be committing a mortal sin, and he would go to hell.  She didn’t say, “Please, please, spare my virginity!” She begged him to spare himself.  

This is what it looks like when someone is close to God:  they want to spare the person.  They are in love with life.  They are focused not on the idea of morality, but on the person whose life and safety (whether physical or spiritual) are at stake.

In Maria Goretti’s case, she was focused on her rapist — and I am sure it was her love for him, and not her blindingly pure devotion to chastity, that converted him and brought him to repentance before she died.  That is how conversions happen.  That is how people are saved:  when other people show love for them.  It’s about other people.  It’s always about our love for other people.  That’s why, before someone is declared a saint, they have to perform two miracles for people still on earth.  Even after death, it’s not about the cause or the system or the virtue in the abstract.  It’s always about our love for other people.

Ideas like holiness, chastity, humility, charity, diligence, or any other virtue that springs to mind when you think of a saint?  These are bathwater.  These are the things that surround and support the “baby” of love in action.  A bath without bathwater is no good; but a bath without someone to be bathed is even more pointless. God doesn’t want bathwater saints, ardently devoted to a cause or a principle or a movement or a virtue.  God wants us to love and care for each other.  Love for each other is how we order our lives.  Love for each other is how we serve God.

It’s always about our love for other people.

At the Register: Should You Get a Dog? A Quiz

Why are you asking me? You’ve obviously made up your mind already, you fool.

I’ll be on Al Kresta on Wednesday the 5th (probably)

Radio schedules fluctuate, so the air date may change, but I am doing the taping today.  And I can’t find the DVD remote.  So, tune in to Kresta in the Afternoon on Ave Maria Radio, if only to hear the circus noises in the background.  I am making this three-ingredient snow dough in hopes that it keeps the kiddies occupied.

Lots of stuff in the works, including a giveaway of two signed copies of my book. In the mean time, if you have read the book, I would be very grateful if you would take the time to write a review on Amazon. Every review drives it higher in ranking, which brings it to more people’s attention, which drives up sales, which allows me to buy more cheese for my ratties nine!  Many, many thanks to everyone who has bought the book!

A note about comments and blocking people

Every five or six days, I get an angry or hurt email from someone demanding to know why they’ve been blocked.  In approximately 100% of these cases, I haven’t blocked the person.  What it is, is Disqus (and sometimes the Register commenting system) nets someone’s comment for mysterious reasons that make sense only to the borg brain.  That’s all. It happens to me, too — sometimes I can’t even comment on my own post.  Sometimes I post a comment, and it shows up, only to disappear later.  Why? Who knows? Not me.  If I block you, I will generally tell you why.

My comment policy is not strict.  Don’t be incredibly and repeatedly offensive, and don’t threaten anybody.  That’s about it. I can alter this as I see fit, without warning, because it’s my blog. You don’t have any right to be heard on my blog; but I don’t have any particular desire to micromanage how stupid and awful you wish to appear in public.

That being said, the A #1 way to make sure I don’t block someone is to insist that I block someone.  When I write in public, whether here or on the Register or on Facebook or in magazines or wherever, I set myself up for a 24 hour stream of nonsense, and believe me, that stream ain’t drying up anytime soon.  One way I deal with it is to remind myself that it’s my choice how much nonsense I want to put up with.  If I want it to stop, I stop it. If I don’t care, I let it go. It’s my decision, because it’s my blog.  I cannot overstate how important it is to me to own that decision.  If you know of a better, fairer, more sensible way to run a combox, then start your own blog and go for it.

Okey doke?  Sorry if this is crabby. I’ve had a brutal sinus head cold for a week now, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have writing deadlines, and radio interviews, and six-layer cakes to bake, and dinner to cook, and doctor’s appointments, and homework to check, and teachers to placate, and dog pee to mop up, and sacraments to prepare for, and so on. I’m tired and mean and doing my best to get stuff done, and I don’t need any advice on how to do it better.